Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s National People’s Power Party won at least 123 of the 225 seats in parliament, according to partial results released by the Elections Commission.

STORY: Sri Lankans have handed president Anura Kumara Dissanayake a strong win in a snap general election, giving him more power to fight poverty and corruption.Dissanayake, a political outsider, easily won the presidential election in September.

The NPP won 107 seats, receiving almost 62 per cent or 6.8 million votes in Thursday’s election, putting them past the majority mark in the parliament, latest results on the Election Commission of Sri Lanka‘s website showed. A two-third majority appeared within reach of the coalition.

Sri Lankans are voting in a parliamentary election that's key for their new, Marxist-leaning president to consolidate his party’s power and follow through on promises of economic recovery.

Sri Lanka's president's coalition, the National People's Power (NPP) posted an early lead in a parliamentary election, local television channel Ada Derana said on Thursday.

Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s coalition took an early lead in parliamentary elections seen as a test of the leftist leader’s ambitious pledges to combat corruption and change the terms of an unpopular International Monetary Fund bailout.

Sri Lanka began counting votes cast on Thursday in a snap general election that will decide if the Indian Ocean island nation will give its new leftist president greater legislative power to help the poor as it recovers from a financial meltdown.